Terminal Rage (27 page)

Strauss walked up and squeezed his arm. They couldn
’
t stay there forever was the unspoken message. Blackwell needed to zero in on what the hell this was all about quick. So he put his urge to hurl on pause and studied the face of the frozen corpse.
Where have I seen this man before? And why was I summoned here to witness this?
He fixed his gaze at the bullet wound until finally the horrific realization of who this man was infected his consciousness.

During the Exertify standoff, Special Agent Jamie Smythe had sent photographs of the convicted Jordanian terrorists before he freed them. The images had since been burned in Blackwell
’
s mind.

The dead man he was staring at was no other than Tarek Nabulsi, one of the two men Seth had exchanged for Julia Price back in November.

Strauss opened the second freezer. It didn
’
t take much for Blackwell to figure out that Nabulsi
’
s accomplice, Hassan Madi was in it, and had met the same fate.

But it took him a little longer to recognize the third dead body in the room. It was another man, but he hadn
’
t been shot. His throat had been cut, and unlike Nabulsi and Madi, his eyes were wide open, his final terrified seconds frozen in time. Demir Salimovic, the Bosnian handler who had recruited the Jordanians for the terror attack on Sharm El Sheikh in 2005.

“Do you know these people, Alex?”

Blackwell blinked his eyes and pursed his lips.

“Alex. Do you know them?” Strauss seemed impatient now.

Blackwell barely managed a nod.

“Shall we call it in, or clean it up?”

There was little time to think about the two options Strauss had proposed. The gruesome sight of these three executed men was a message Blackwell was meant to decipher. It was all staged for his benefit. He closed his eyes and freed his mind from the horror of what he was staring at, until an electric current of clarity pulsated through his body.

He had understood the message.

“We clean it up, Kristof.”

TWENTY-THREE

Thursday, April 19, 2012—2:35 p.m.
Hermosa Beach, CA

W
hen Blackwell left New York in November after the Exertify case, he thought hard of what the future would hold for him. He wanted to hold his kids and beg their forgiveness. To tell them he
’
d never again sacrifice their well being for the greater good. And never again work for the FBI if he could help it.

But most of the promises he
’
d made to himself on that mid-afternoon train ride from New York to DC were just a knee-jerk reaction to the Exertify events. And what he had failed to see then, only to realize today, was that the real reason he had pursued a career as a federal agent in the first place, had nothing to do with the FBI as an organization, and everything to do with who he was as a person. At the most basic level of his existence, Blackwell was born for one singular purpose: To fight crime and protect the innocent. And whenever he denied this, he always wound up back in the same place.

Finding himself in the lobby of the Grand House hotel in Hermosa Beach to meet with Robert Slant, was possibly the last thing he could have imagined when he sat on that train analyzing his life.

B
lackwell was now a civilian, with no access to the classified databases and information networks of the FBI. Gone were the days when he could ask the CIA or Homeland Security to share their intelligence or compare notes. In fact, he had no legal authority or jurisdiction to be snooping around a federal case in the first place. Not even one he had worked on as a contract negotiator. Let alone a case classified as closed, with no political desire to see it reopened. Julia Price
’
s life had been spared, and her father
’
s career salvaged.

But Robert Slant had come to the rescue.

He was waiting for him in the lobby of the hotel, holding an expensive, but worn out Piquadro briefcase. Slant was gaunt and seemed more agitated than the last time Blackwell had seen him in New York. As he approached him, the smell of tobacco smoke on Slant
’
s clothes was overpowering.

“Sorry to drag you back to this place but I
’
m sorta stuck here.” Slant grabbed Blackwell
’
s hand and shook it with affection. When they had spoken on the phone a few days ago, he had explained to Blackwell he was in Hermosa Beach for covert meetings with Syrian dissidents who were pouring into the West Coast. Wealthy industrialists trickling into the country with truckloads of cash and insider intelligence as their nation burned in slow motion. But Blackwell couldn
’
t be entirely sure this was the whole story. Not that he cared.

A lot of people at the Bureau were suspicious of men like Slant who
’
d crossed over from the CIA. Double agents working for the same side. Even though Langley and the FBI had patched up much of their sibling rivalries after 9/11 and were reading from the same notes now, both organizations were still tribal. Robert Slant
’
s move between the two agencies was effortless, but many people at the Bureau were uncertain where his heart really was. And it was precisely because Slant was not an FBI insider that Blackwell knew he could trust him.

Slant
’
s eyes were tiny slits.

“The irony of the location isn
’
t lost on me, Alex.”

Slant had read up on Blackwell
’
s case file. Four and a half years ago, when Blackwell was working the Hermosa Beach case that had led to his nervous breakdown, he and Monica Vlasic had spent the first night of the investigation at the very same hotel.

He extended his hand and touched Slant on the shoulder.

“You know what they say about beggars, Bob. Thanks for sticking your neck out for me.”

“Shall we do this in my room?”

Blackwell nodded and started moving with Slant. Despite the veneer of indifference he had hoped to project, his heart was getting heavier. Memories of what had happened in this town four and a half years ago began to bubble to the surface of his consciousness.

Early in the morning of July twenty-first, 2007, a heavyset man wearing a hockey mask broke into a multimillion-dollar home on Sixteenth street in Hermosa Beach. The wealthy couple who lived here had driven up to Santa Barbara for the day and left their three teenage daughters home alone. The intruder slipped in through the backyard, held the girls up with a gun and then tied and gagged them. With heartless precision, he raped them on their parent’s bed, one after the other.

When he was done with them, he installed three devices around their necks and called their father on his cell phone. The abductor told him what he had done to his daughters in graphic detai
ls, and emailed him photos to prove it. He had one demand. A three-million-dollar ransom to be transferred to a bank account in the Cayman Islands.

The high-tech devices around the girls
’
necks were collar bombs, loaded with state-of-the-art plastic explosives set to a timer. If the ransom was paid, he would disable and unlock the collar bombs remotely. But if they didn
’
t comply within forty-eight hours, the collar bombs would explode.

Using hidden cameras, he was watching the girls and monitoring the external perimeter of the house. If the cops or the feds tried to rescue them, he would override the timer and detonate the bombs. The collar devices were also connected wirelessly to a beacon signal planted somewhere inside the house. If any of the girls tried to escape and went out of range, it would trigger the explosives.

He hung up, left the house, and until this day was never identified, captured or heard from again.

An FBI team lead by Vlasic was flown in from DC to work the case. Blackwell wasn
’
t just one of the Bureau
’
s best negotiators, but also had extensive training with the Office of Victim Assistance at the Bureau. Many times during hostage crises, events changed rapidly and he would find himself communicating with the hostages instead of the hostage takers. And that is exactly how it had panned out in Hermosa Beach. With the abductor gone, Blackwell had to counsel the girls and collect every morsel of intelligence about the man who did this to them while that information remained vivid in their minds.

By and large, he had succeeded in keeping the girls emotionally contained, despite the horrific assault they had experienced and the threat of death hanging around their necks.

After a grueling first day on the case, Blackwell and Vlasic went back to their hotel. They had less than five hours to get some shut-eye before resuming the operation. While they rested, the FBI techies would work around the clock to come up with a possible extraction and rescue plan. It was up to Vlasic
’
s discretion to approve whatever scheme was hatched, or to decide to give in and pay the ransom. The girls
’
parents were staying up all night with other FBI victim liaisons to reassure and support the girls, who were too traumatized and terrified to sleep.

Slant opened the door of his beachfront room and showed Blackwell in. He slid open the shutters of the balcony and allowed the afternoon sun to flood through, tossed his briefcase on the coffee table, then released a huge sigh and turned to Blackwell. “Drink?”

He didn
’
t respond to Slant
’
s hospitality immediately. Blackwell was absorbing every detail of the room. His sense of observation was sublime and had served him well at the FBI. The only thing that had changed since he and Vlasic had spent a night in this hotel four-and-a-half-years ago was the ultra thin LED television that had replaced the first generation plasma that used to be there. The room had of course been refreshed to account for wear and tear, but the earthy green-and-tan color scheme was exactly as he remembered it. The same plush fabrics and carpets. And the expensive, evocative aromas permeating the air. It was like he had never left.

“Sure. Corona, if you got it.” He walked out to the balcony and gazed off to the shoreline. There was no one on the beach except a little boy flying a red kite with his father. He looked at the tiny figure of the child and remembered Milo at that age. Blackwell would have preferred to keep thinking of his son, but the other thoughts he was trying to avoid were stronger than him.

He and Vlasic had picked up some In-and-Out burgers, which they munched in the car driving back to the Grand House hotel. Before he’d even removed his shoes back in his room, Vlasic called him to ask him over for a nightcap. And he accepted.

In her room Blackwell found she had popped open two frosty Coronas for them. A cold drink and some chilled conversation would do him good after the heart-wrenching events of the day and the terrifying possibilities ahead, he rationalized.

This was the first time Blackwell had worked a case with Monica. She had surprised him by how easygoing she appeared despite all the office rumors to the contrary. Monica was an attractive woman—there were no ifs, ands, or buts about that. And she was a strong agent with an excellent case record. Crossing paths in the corridors of the Hoover building, they often exchanged polite smiles. But the agents who had worked with her made her out to be some nasty piece of work. An “ass-licking, opportunistic bitch” was the general consensus within the male rank-and-file.

They sat on her balcony with their feet up on the wooden rails. She wore an oversized wasabi green T-shirt. Her bare feet were seductive, even without the benefit of varnish on her toenails. She wasn
’
t wearing a bra, he could tell from the imprint of her nipples. And she wasn
’
t wearing panties either, as she would later confess.

He had never before seen her in her natural element, without makeup and with her hair loose. She seemed relaxed. That unapproachable and brittle work persona she was notorious for seemed to come off at the end of the workday, just like dry contact lenses or uncomfortable shoes. That stereotypical role of the female FBI agent fighting tooth-and-nail and trampling on whoever stood in her way seemed more like a myth now.

Vlasic jumped straight into her personal life and told him casually of the affairs she had with mutual colleagues. People like Robert Slant. She
’
d said it as if fucking fellow agents was part of the job description.

Her openness allowed him to reciprocate. Blackwell spilled the beans about his failing marriage. Melanie had become resentful of his job and his unwavering commitment to the FBI. She was just jealous of his career, he had thought, because she
’
d given up hers to raise the kids. The last five years of their marriage could be summed up as her breaking his balls every day to quit the service. Working for the Bureau though wasn
’
t just about having a job, but a commitment to the organization and belief in its purpose. If there was anyone in the world who could understand this, who could empathize with Blackwell
’
s conundrum, it was Monica.

Even though they had barely downed a few beers, Monica reached out and held his hand and their feet touched. Precisely at the point when Blackwell was at his most vulnerable talking about his unhappy marriage. Neither of them questioned it or made the other feel awkward. It just happened, and it felt good. Given the events of the day, Blackwell craved the intimacy. They continued to talk and quietly ignored what their bodies were doing.

Monica got up to use the washroom and gave him a quick kiss on the lips, once again, without any implicit drama. No buildup. No guilt. No promises. It was just a kiss. One neither of them would probably remember the next day with the benefit of sobriety.

“Another beer?” she asked, without waiting for an answer.

Minutes later, he turned around to see her through the open balcony doors. She had come out of the bathroom fully naked. He swallowed. She had just raised the stakes. It was now more than just a carefree footsie or an impulsive peck on the mouth shared between two slightly tipsy and overworked agents. Monica didn
’
t come back with more beers. Instead, she dimmed the lights in the room, slipped under the sheets of her bed, and purred to him softly.

“Alex?”

“Yes?” He was finding it harder to pretend he was oblivious to what was about to happen. And judging by the way his body was reacting, even if his mind tried to steer him clear of danger, he was craving it. It was going to be near impossible to resist it.

“Will you fuck me tonight? It
’
s been a very long time since anyone has.”

As Slant popped open the Corona and poured the frothy foam into tall chilled glasses, Blackwell wondered if this could have been the very same room where he and Vlasic screwed until the early hours of the morning. Even the most hardened agents knew sex and the stress of field work fed off each other. The perils of the job set the mood for even more risky behavior, while sex itself was the greatest releaser of mental and physical exhaustion. That’s why many happily married agents working the grind end up in bed with one another.

He looked at Slant
’
s tidy room, but all he could see were images of the bed sheets scattered on the floor with his body fused into Vlasic. He, thrusting inside her with animal vigor. She, pinned on the carpet under him, moaning for mercy, or more, or both. Then after, how amazing it made him feel. Alive again. A man again.